Brian Boyd is Project Director of the Columbia Center for Archaeology and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1996. He has been working on, and directing, a number of archaeological projects in Palestine, Lebanon and Israel since 1988, and is currently co-directing a Columbia-Birzeit-Sorbonne interdisciplinary project (anthropology, archaeology, environment, oral histories, community anthropology) in the West Bank. He has published extensively on the prehistoric archaeology of the region, as well as on aspects of archaeological theory.

Nora Akawi (born Haifa, 1985) is an architect based in New York, currently completing her MSc. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture, at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Her current research is on the political role of the (digital) collective archive in the visualization of the Palestinian spatial narrative and in imagining alternative spatial and political organization. Nora is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (B.Arch, 2009).

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Directs The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2011). The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into twenty-one languages. She is currently working on When Territory Exits Existing Frameworks (Under contract with Harvard University Press). She contributes regularly to www.OpenDemocracy.net and www.HuffingtonPost.com.